Come, Follow Me January 8-14: 1 Nephi 1-5
In 2024, the Maxwell Institute will offer a weekly series of short essays on the Book of Mormon, in support of the Church-wide Come, Follow Me study curriculum. Each week, the Maxwell Institute blog will feature a post by a member of the Institute faculty exploring an aspect of the week’s reading block. We hope these explorations will enrich your study and teaching of the Book of Mormon throughout the coming year.
God’s Generosity and a new beginning of the Book of Mormon
by Kristian S. Heal
To encounter scripture is to encounter God’s generosity. And God knows how to give generously, “good measure, pressed down, shaken together, running over.” (Luke 6:38). The purpose of God’s generosity is to nourish and reinforce his relationship with his children. God wants to enter into fellowship with his children and does this through covenant (1 Nephi 2:19-20). Scripture, then, is the story of God’s work in the world to create covenant belonging with his children. When we read scripture, especially the Book of Mormon, it is always worth asking how God’s generosity creates covenant belonging.
My deepest conviction is that God is at work in the world. The love of God cannot be restrained. The generosity of God never stops overflowing. God loves his children; he loves me and you and is always ready to bless and lead us into covenant belonging with him. This is God’s great plan of happiness, a plan embodied in the person, mission, and teachings of Jesus Christ.
How can this belief renew our reading of the Book of Mormon? The first thing it can do is inflect our questions with God’s generosity. To read scripture like this can be difficult. Sometimes God’s generosity is immediately evident (e.g. 1 Nephi 1:14); other times, we must use our imagination to let the scriptures unfold their possibilities.
Scripture is not without its oddities. Something will always make us look twice and ask what is going on. The Book of Mormon is no exception. The book opens with a violent killing, a theft, and a fugitive family on the run, for example. Where is God’s generosity in these stories? How are these stories about covenant belonging? Why begin the book this way?
There are lots of very good answers to these questions. A close reading of the book of 1 Nephi shows, for example, that it is filled with generous echoes of the Exodus story. Nephi is a new Moses heading to a new promised land. Moses’s call also included a killing committed for the best of reasons (Exodus 2:11-12). This act propelled Moses and his story into the desert to encounter God in unforeseen ways. So, the story of Laban serves an important narrative and rhetorical function, further weaving this new book of scripture to the old and broadening our sense of the significance of what at first seems like a simple family history. The generosity of biblical citation and allusion found in the Book of Mormon makes this restoration scripture reverberate with the voice of God.
Reading the story through the lens of God’s generosity and covenant belonging may require both scriptural imagination and careful attention to the text. Close reading shows that Nephi composed the book of 1 Nephi at least thirty years after his family left Jerusalem (2 Nephi 5:28-33). In this light, it is possible to imagine that the reason the killing of Laban is in the book at all is that Nephi had spent a long time trying to fully understand the experience himself. Elder Packer taught that a testimony is found in the bearing of it (“That All May Be Edified” [1982], 340), and perhaps Nephi only finally and fully understood the story years later when he included it in his prophetic record of God’s work in his life. It is possible that this experience only fully made sense looking back from the vantage point of the founding of a new covenant people and the vital role that the scriptures played in this founding. Within Nephi’s full story, the death of Laban became an example of God’s grace and the importance of covenant faithfulness. Note, for example, how Nephi frames God’s grace not as a reward for righteousness but as an enabling power facilitating obedience to God’s command (1 Nephi 3:7). It is possible to imagine this famous passage coming to Nephi as a revelation, helping him understand Laban’s death. On a plain reading of the first book of Nephi, when we read what Nephi tells us about why he was to kill Laban (1 Nephi 4:10-18), it is easy to think that all was clear to the young prophet. However, as we use our scriptural imagination and pay close attention to the text’s details, it is possible to see that the full purpose of this command was not clear to Nephi until years later, after much prayer and wrestling. Perhaps even prophets must wait on God’s timing to understand what they are called to do.
This, it seems to me, is the burden of those faithful followers who are quick to obey. It’s not always clear why we are prompted or asked to do something by the Lord or his servants. Sometimes, as an act of grace, we learn the reason, or a reason, shortly after we act. But God’s ways are higher than ours, and to enter into fellowship with God and enjoy that sense of covenant belonging often requires us to cede certain things, and one of them is understanding all of what God is doing through us. This is a hard saying for me. I want a more rational faith. I want to understand before I act, to receive the witness before the trial of my faith. Nephi was willing to act in faith, to go and do. Sometimes the explanations for the commands came in the moment, but other times, and the story of Laban may be one of those examples, it was not clear until long after the fact, or perhaps not at all.
Ultimately, then, even this story of a killing that causes me so much consternation can be read as another instance of God’s generosity to this newly-called young prophet. I feel sure that Nephi's experiences in those first few months of his journey of faith, both the great and the terrible, were a constant site of reflection and ultimately a generous mine of faith for him, as they can also be for us. They teach us that even the sites of greatest pain or deepest doubt can, with God, turn into the most abundant founts of faith.